That annoying vSphere “Failed to Deploy OVF package” message.

I’ve had this happen to me a couple of times now. Someone creates a new image they want to use, export it as an ova file and they give it to you to use. A pretty simple procedure, but unfortunately, many times, the admin forgets to remove the ISO they were using before exporting. So when you go to import the OVA you get this annoying message:

See, it tells you right there, iso was not found. What can you do now? Well you have two options:

Explain to the admin that you need another export, but please change the CD to client device instead of ISO and wait for them to do it and re-export the file for you, or

Fix it yourself. It’s pretty easy, here’s how.

First get a program that will unarchive the ova file. My favorite is 7-zip.

Unzip the ova. Yep, it’s that easy to open an ova. If you extract it to another folder, you’ll have something that looks like this:

Copy the OVF file to another location so that you have it in case you mess up, then open the OVF with Wordpad or some other editor. This is all of the information about the VM you are importing. Look for the words vmware.cdrom.iso. You want to delete everyting from the <Item above it to the </Item> below it:

After deleting these lines, save the OVF file.

The final step is to remove the .MF file. This is the checksum, and you have changed the checksum by changing the file.

Now you can deploy the OVF file. Don’t point to the OVA file you got earlier, but to the new OVF. It will import just fine. There that wasn’t hard at all was it?